Rs. 500 Notes, Blank On One Side, From An ATM In Madhya Pradesh

Khargone, Madhya Pradesh: An ATM in a Madhya Pradesh village was found to be dispensing blank 500-rupee notes. This comes days after farmer in Madhya Pradesh had received 2,000-rupee notes from his bank without Mahatma Gandhi’s image on the flip side of the note.

On Tuesday night, Hemant Soni from Segaon village in Khargone district used his card to withdraw Rs. 1,500 from an ATM machine of a public sector bank. Out of the three 500-rupee notes that the ATM machine dispensed, two were blank on one side.

Mr Soni registered a complaint of the misprinted currency yesterday with the concerned bank officials, who subsequently replaced his notes with new ones. The bank officials clarified that the blank notes were received as is from the Reserve Bank of India.

“We have changed these ‘misprinted’ currency notes after the consumer’s complaint. We are now checking the currency notes before loading them into the ATMs,” the deputy manager of the bank’s Sabji Mandi main branch told news agency PTI.

“This is a printing mistake,” he added.

Last week, a farmer in Madhya Pradesh withdrew three notes of Rs. 2,000 from his account only to be stunned later to find Mahatma Gandhi’s image missing on one side. To his immense relief, the bank official assured him that the notes are genuine, and advised him to deposit them. The manager explained that there might have been a printing error at one press. The notes have been replaced by the bank since.

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly banned the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes on November 8, the new 2,000 rupee notes were printed under the “Mahatma Gandhi New Series”.